When things gO Wrong

Sundays are always a bad day for me. I pay bills on Sundays. Sunday is the last day of the weekend. I always get depressed on Sundays. I came up with a brilliant plan to, once again, attempt to play World of Warcraft with my wife on Sunday nights (I need a break from beta testing once and a while). It would give me something to look forward to. Since Guild Wars wasn’t doing it for her, and WoW did, it was an obvious solution. She was happy to go back and play more, she had fun in WoW.

So, the kids go to bed and I set up both accounts. My brother plays on Doomhammer so we decided to go Horde and join him, if nothing else for someone to chat with once and a while. Let the fun begin.

First up, connecting to Doomhammer. Login queue, 25 minutes. Sucks, but I’ve seen worse. Still 25 minutes gone. We finally get in and create characters. Spend some time reading about the various races and classes and decide to go Undead. We picked some names and log in, except for one thing. Blizzard has a feature by which disables new character creation on servers that are in a login queue. Which Doomhammer was. No game for her. That’s right, I already had a character on Doomhammer and thus it was more than happy to let me make a character. Good thing I put a character on each server a long time ago, in order to take advantage of Blizzard’s generous free days when things go crash boom bang.

With that behind us, my wife decided to go out and run some errands. An hour and a half later, I was able to get her new character created. Let the fun begin.

We logged in and started playing. A minute later she disconnects. Back in and a minute later she disconnects. Sometimes we manage to get up to 10 minutes in before disconnect. My machine never disconnected. So I switch machines with her and she logs in and plays solo for a while and I go into tech support mode. After checking the router, network settings, and firewall settings, I was able to get it working. The problem was solved by placing the proper port exceptions in the Windows firewall. Strange thing as we never had problems playing WoW on that machine before in the past year or two.

So I guess we got a total of 30 minutes of game time in, for spending about 5 hours messing around with things. WoW does everything in it’s power to keep me from playing.

Monday night update: Ha! My side hurts it’s so funny. We decided to make up for some lost time tonight. Doomhammer offline. Hilarious hijinks.
Tuesday night update: We played about 3 hours, getting up to level 7. Had a good time. Some guy was following us around for a while and he said he was 10 years old and was really good at WoW. He offered to teach us how to play. At least I think that is what he was trying to say. The guy seemed to have a fear of using any words with more than 3 letters.

– Ethic

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Ethic

I own this little MMO gaming blog but I hardly ever write on it any more. I'm more of a bloglord or something. Thankfully I have several minions to keep things rolling along.
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9 thoughts on “When things gO Wrong”

I don’t like Sundays either, so I can sympathize :)
There’s never a login queue for my server (Thunderhorn, EU PvE), except on Sundays.
As for the rest, char creation and firewall configuration should be a “once only” event, so hopefully you’ll be able to actually play next Sunday, or whenever it is you choose. But if I were you I would choose another day, Sunday is a good day to go to read books or watch TV, instead of logging in to WoW and waiting who-knows-how-long in queue :)

The answer is given in one of the FAQs on Blizzard’s site: “World of Warcraft requires that port 3724 is open. The Blizzard Downloader requires that ports 3724 and 6112 are open. It can also benefit from having ports 6881 through 6999 open.”

I’m pretty sure all you need is 3724 open. I get the message that “your computer appears to be behind a firewall” – but the only thing that happens is that Blizzard Downloader can’t use my machine to host P2P transfer. Which is fine by me; they want to distribute their patches, they can do it off their own damn machines.

I wish there was a way to have CoH’s character creator and maybe Atlas Park offline. I still smile thinking about all the crazy characters I made with friends and then ran around the newbie land being silly.

Hmm. I actually thought WoW’s 1-30 was pretty damned fun. I have not played EQ2 enough to know how it compares. Regardless, my wife is guiding the game choices right now and I’m simply thrilled she wants to play games with me at all.

Drubear: thanks for the fine group last night, was good fun. The wife still feels bad about her warrior’s death even though she was the only one to die. I told her the warrior’s job is to die in order to save us softies. heh